How would you measure the success of Google Calendar?
Interviewer: How would you measure the success of Google Calendar?
Shailesh: First I would like to discuss what is Google Calendar, what’s the value proposition of Google Calendar and what is the business model of Google Calendar so that we have clarity about the product.
Interviewer: Sounds good.
Shailesh: Google Calendar is a Productivity tool for anyone who wants to stay organized, manage their time effectively and collaborate with other people.
To clarify, we are thinking about the Google Calendar as a standalone product, not as a part of Google Suite.
Interviewer: Aligned.
Shailesh: Now that we know what’s the goal of Google Calendar.
It’s important for us to know about its main stakeholders and what the value Google Calendar is providing to them.
Until and unless we are not able to identify the value provided to the stakeholders, it’s very difficult to define the metrics for the success.
So there are two stakeholders Users and Google.
For Users, it’s managing time and increasing productivity by collaborating using Google Calendar by Creating Events/tasks right?
For Google, it’s able to Provide value to users so that users can convert to the Google Suite. So Google Calendar is basically increasing the Value of Google Suite and hence increasing the revenue for the company.
Interviewer: Right, these are the values that are provided to different stakeholders.
Shailesh: I would like to discuss what’s the Intersection of the value. What is one thing that is of interest to all of the stakeholders be it Users and Google? It’s Time Management and Collaboration. Now how do we do it?
We do it by using Events/tasks from the Google Calendar.
From now onwards, we will use Events as a single entity for everything in Google Calendar.
Interviewer: Please go ahead.
Shailesh: Managing Events for Time and collaboration is something which all stakeholders care about. That’s the core value of Google Calendar.
Interviewer: What do you think our Northstar Metric should be?
Shailesh: The North Star Metric would be the Number of Successful Events managed per Day.
Interviewer: How do we define success here?
Shailesh: So for this, we need to take one proxy.
When you schedule a meeting/event at least 50% of the stakeholders should accept that would be a proxy of a successful Event. It may be 50 or 60%. Because after scheduling a meeting, we don't know whether that meeting has happened or not, that means we don't know if our Google Calendar is able to provide a good value in time management or not in terms of Conflict resolution. But we can take a proxy of 50% or 60%, so all the events with 50-60% acceptance will be a successful event.
This is the North Star Metric, but we need to break it down into different L0 metrics which would be levers of this North Star Metric. These levers will help you to come up with some other L1 Metrics which are important.
So, the North Star Metric can be broken down into Daily Active Users * Sessions per User * Events created per session (Successful Events).
Interviewer: Sounds correct.
Shailesh: Now if you see the first term will tell us the acquisition side of things, the second term will tell us the engagement side of things and the final term will tell us about the engagement or let’s say completion.
These will define the Success of Google Calendar, an uptick in these Metrics will move the needle in the North Star Metric.
Once we identified the L0 metric as a Lever of North Star Metric, let’s break down L0 Metrics further into L1 Metrics.
For the Acquisition side, we need to track the New use acquisition which will be the driver of the growth on our platform. So we will track New User Growth Month on Month. The other thing which we will track is User churn, users who have used it once but are not using it now. They are our churned users.
Then comes the engagement part, that is session per user.
If you are an active user, how many sessions are you doing on average?
Here we will track, Session length. Average number of calendar views for other users. One other metric which we will track is the Number of users who are sharing their Calendar with others. These will be our primary engagement metric.
From the Completion aspect, we will see some of the L1 Metric:
Events Cancellation Rate
Event Deletion Rate
Average number of users collaborated per Event
One other metric that we can track is % of Events with proper descriptions and attachments.
Now let’s see some of the counter metrics to check which would be
Error Reporting Rate
1-star rating for Google Calendar
% of detractors in NPS
Important Links
-- Technomanagers
Comments
Post a Comment